Essays on listening insightful, poetic

In our noisy world, the art of listening can often be overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant, but can yield important insights. In Hark: How Women Listen, Alice Vincent looks at some of the ways women can listen more attentively and thus gain insights that might otherwise be lost to them.

Vincent is a columnist for the Guardian and New Statesman, as well as the author of four books, including the bestseller Why Women Grow. Two of her books have been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. She writes a newsletter called Savour and is the host of two podcasts. Currently, she lives in London.

At some levels, Hark is a deeply personal book, recounting the author’s experiences with hearing her baby’s heartbeat during pregnancy and later listening for his cries. When the infant became ill enough to be confined to a hospital, the author would sometimes hear phantom cries, proceeding from her imagination.

Although her son recovered after a series of painful procedures, she notes that many women continue to hear their babies’ cries even after the children have died.

Much of Hark is devoted to the listening of motherhood, in which mothers are particularly attuned to their own children’s sounds. However, Vincent also explores the unique type of listening demanded of two translators at the United Nations, where they must understand the nuances of two languages to translate the sense of a phrase rather than just giving a word-for-word translation, as well as other examples.

The book is arranged as a series of short essays in sections labelled according to seasons or months of the year. Among the ideas and sounds Vincent explores: waiting to hear the call of a nightingale; experiencing the military “sound mirrors” that can pick up the noise of approaching aircraft; exploring the idea that aurora borealis emit sounds; and the role of listening in theatrical work. For most of the essays, she highlights the work of a woman involved in the field.

Vincent has written Hark in a style that might seem almost poetic to some readers, with many descriptions of the feelings that listening can evoke. Some readers might not take to the author’s decision to dedicate such a large portion of the book to motherhood and to individual women in specific jobs rather than exploring the issue of listening among women in general. As a personal memoir with a few outside anecdotes, however, the book is well worth reading.

Despite a somewhat misleading subtitle, Hark: How Women Listen is an interesting and well-written book many readers could enjoy. Arranging the anecdotes according to the seasons and months of the year helps focus the reader’s attention on the author’s growing understanding of the role of sound in her life.

Both a personal memoir and a call for people to become more aware of how they interact with the sounds around them, the book will captivate anyone interested in how sound can affect women’s perceptions and even their ability to function.

Susan Huebert is a Winnipeg writer and pet sitter.